Thomas Mann and democracy, USC in DC

Colleagues,

 

The University of Southern California and the Goethe Institute are hosting a conference this Saturday in Washington, DC on the writings of celebrated German novelist Thomas Mann on democracy. I moderate an afternoon panel with Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die). 

 

You can have a look at the program and speakers list here. Saturday’s conference takes place at the USC DC campus at 1771 N St. NW.

 

Here’s my interview this week with Stephanie Bolzen of Die Welt on the Middle East Broadcasting Networks’ legal battle for Congressionally approved funding in wider political context: https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article256071686/Klage-gegen-Budgetkuerzung-Man-kann-sich-gegen-Trump-wehren-und-gewinnen.html

 

Germans are particularly reflective on the subject of liberal democracy and its discontents. The right-wing populist, pro-Putin AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) has been thriving. One recent poll put the AfD at 26 percent with the Christian democratic CDU/CSU at 25 percent.

 

*****

 

Thomas Mann’s books were banned in Nazi Germany. In 1933, Mann was stripped of his citizenship. In 1938, he emigrated to America (arriving on a Czech passport). Mann lived in the United States for 14 years — primarily in LA, in Pacific Palisades — and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles is a partner in Saturday’s conference.

 

Mann started work on his novel Doktor Faustus in 1942, completing the book in 1947, two years after capitulation and ruin for Germany. In Mann’s Faustus, composer Adrian Leverkühn bargains his soul away for musical genius. There’s depravity, disease, and disintegration in the story. There’s yearning for a dark past. Mann’s devil speaks in a German of the 16th century. 

 

My favorite Mann work is the novel that features one character pleading for reason, science, and education pitted against another obsessed with denouncing self-serving, condescending elites. The Italian humanist Settembrini is a tireless defender of Enlightenment values in Mann’s Magic Mountain. Naphta, a Spanish-schooled Jesuit and convert to Catholicism, is Settembrini’s nemesis as the two fight for the soul of young Hans Castorp. Naphta is a zealot. He’s armed with force of personality, rhetorical gifts — and charged by authoritarian enthusiasm. 

 

The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg)—720 pages in English, 1001 pages in German—was published in 1924. That was the year when a U.S. plan alleviated a European crisis by helping to resolve the issue of reparations that Germany was still paying from World War I. That same year, France agreed to end its occupation of the Ruhr region and Adolf Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison for treason. Things were looking up for Weimar’s young German democracy. For a fleeting moment.

 

Mann became an eloquent champion of Weimar democracy. It’s not the way things started, though. He had initially embraced nationalism and supported enthusiastically German goals in World War I. During World War II, Mann was recording anti-Nazi broadcasts for Voice of America and the BBC. 

 

During his time in the U.S., Mann delivered a series of lectures at the Library of Congress on history, literature, culture, and democracy.

 

Saturday’s conference on Thomas Mann and democracy at USC’s DC campus will feature panel discussions, lectures, a recital, as well as a sound artwork by Grammy-nominated musician Kokayi.

 

Meanwhile for MBN and U.S.-funded international media: We’re still fighting and expect news from a court this week.

 

My best, Jeff